Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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the Judeo-Christian tradition, where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame. In the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia, they started always with, they wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I've got this experience.
I can't get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there's like a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. You know, not like slavishly. We don't all have to become Buddhists to do it. But there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn't.
I think, but I think we can do it. I think there's aspects of it. I mean, as long as you're never trying to like, this is what experience is. Like, I think that's kind of the where we're, you know, you're never going to have a causal account of experience because it's just given, but you can do lots about, and that's what the good work is, is to, how do I approach this?
How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in the, you know, this is what we're accounting with our semantic information to causal closure. Love this idea, right? The idea that, so we talked about autopoiesis a while back, right?
The idea that living systems are, they are self-creating and self-maintaining. So the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can't have a cell without a cell membrane. The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out, right? But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it's a product of the processes that the cell membrane creates.
In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there's this strange... It's always with life. There's always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that's ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure, accounting for how... The, you know, we talk about like downward causation, right?
So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms, right? That's it. You don't really, if you know, if you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you're done. You know, of course, in principle, you need God's computer, but fine. You know, in principle, you know, in principle, it can be done.
Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this, there's ways in which, using epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates.
Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws. Whether that paper is true or not, it's an example of heading down that road. There's also Robert Rosen's work. He was a theoretical biologist.
He talked about closure to efficient cause, that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed, so that they don't depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof. which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it's, you know, some argue it's true, some argue it's not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete.
They cannot be represented as formal systems. So, you know, in that way, they're not axioms. They're not, living systems will not be axioms. They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now, again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof was, you know, is valid or not. But I'm saying, I'm giving you examples of like, you know,
When you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. You know, the book we thought was going to be really heretical, right? You know, obviously, you know, most public-facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphalism. So we were just like waiting, you know, waiting for the fight.
And then the review from science came out, and it was like – totally pro, you know, they was very positive. We're like, oh my God, you know? And then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.
And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal because we kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized sort of all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blind spots. Socialism, communism, doesn't matter. These extractive, you know, had sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to, you know, resources.
The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there's actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever. And we're not, you know, we're sort of stuck in a vortex.
I think we can do it because it's also the thing, you know, what's really interesting is this, I think it's not just first person, it's first and second, right? Because science, because when, so like one idea is that we, you know, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That's one way of talking about objectivity.
There's a whole other way, is that I do the experiment, you do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity. And it acknowledges that, you know, when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible, right?
So there's a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe, by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it's actually pretty fluid. Like my liver cell is an individual, but really it's part of the liver. And my liver is, you know, a separate system, but really it's part of me. But I'm, so I'm an individual, yay.
But actually I'm part of a society. Like, and I couldn't be me without the entire community of, say, language users, right? I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems, right, that are alive, that I am a part of a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff. And then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere, right?
We're never separable, as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphalist science view wants like Boltzmann brains. You're just a brain floating in the space, you know?
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